No. I do not worship the Free Market God, for I have seen his frailties, and he is not a true God.

Now, from that weird break below to ramble briefly about sex, I return to the issue of healthcare that we can't seem to escape lately:

Please stop telling me how great the free market is at fixing things and creating the best systems possible. See, I work for a private company. And I see the bureaucracy, and the laziness, and the shit we get away with doing to customers and the crap we can pass off as a product to them. And guess what? We still have paying customers. Thousands of them. We still have customers because there's no real competition for us (broadband service in rural communities). The free market hasn't made competing with us look very profitable. And so our customers get what we give them, which isn't great. We could do better, but why would we when we are already making money? There's nothing magical about the profit motive, you see. The only thing unique about it compared to other motives is it usually, but not always, leads to profit. Sometimes it leads to failure. Much like political motive. Sometimes political motive creates a product that is successful from a political standpoint. Sometimes it fails. But neither motive is perfect. And when one has failed, I say, let's try another.